I've written before that one of the joys of having been a dumpy, fat, sedentary young person is that, at least for a while, it's truly possible to get better as you get older. While everyone else is declining, I am improving, getting stronger, leaner, and faster as the months go by! It's like time is running backwards for me right now. Very rewarding.
Of course that can't go on forever. The only book about running in my personal library has this to say about aging:
"Women distance runners typically hit their years of peak performance before the age of 40. Runers who start training later in life, however, can expect years of improvement, no matter what their age. Mary Kirsling, for example, continued to get faster well into her seventies after starting at age 64; Diane Palmason experienced 8 years of improvement after beginning to run at the age of 38. In general, from the day you start running, you can expect 8 to 10 years of improvement before your times begin to slow."
Well. I began running at the age of 34. No fanfare of trumpets or anything, but I've quietly marked this in my mind: Suppose I try for the goal of continuing to run faster until I'm 44.
Push my peak back past my 44th birthday.
It's a little more than nine years out. I can't control everything about those nine years. I will have to make allowances if pregnancies, injuries, or illnesses set me back. But I can make choices along the way that make this more likely. Let's see if I can celebrate my 44th birthday on the up side of the learning curve.
UPDATE: More on running times and aging. The Fair Model is a way to take aging into account when comparing current times to times you've run in the past. It provides a lookup table of coefficients (two tables, actually — one for 10Ks or shorter, one for longer-than-10K races) to weight your running time based on age.
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